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How a Beijing bookshop became one of the world’s best

BEIJING—Alexandra Pearson has always loved books — although there have been times when some of her friends thought perhaps too much.

She recalls an afternoon in Beijing in 2004 when a friend accompanied her to a United Nations book sale just 30 minutes before it closed.

“I think the friend was expecting we’d come back with a couple of shopping bags’ full,” Pearson says with a smile. “I bought the lot — we came out with about 3,000.”

Pearson was then in the early stages of building The Bookworm, a unique lending library and bookstore specializing in English books in the Chinese capital.

A little more than six years on, the Bookworm is today ranked as one of the world’s 10 greatest bookshops by the Lonely Planet travel guides, and hosts an international book festival that is quickly gaining stature around the world.

Pearson is a fan of Toronto’s International Festival of Authors at Harbourfront and attended last year, returning to Beijing teeming with energy and ideas.

“It’s an amazingly well put-together festival,” she says.

She isn’t entirely clear on how Lonely Planet’s rankings are made, but calls it an “honour” for the Bookworm to be placed among such legendary shops as Shakespeare & Company in Paris and City Lights Books in San Francisco.

However, the Bookworm is more than just a bookshop with a library, bar and restaurant: it’s a hot house of discussion, creativity and ideas in one of the world’s most happening cities.

Its big book-lined rooms, free Wi-Fi, hip music and good food have made it a magnet for expats and young, English-speaking Chinese alike.

But it’s the Bookworm International Literary Festival that has put it on the map for top international authors curious about China: Americans Dave Eggers and David Sedaris were here for events in January. This month, Toronto’s Emma Donoghue and 70 other writers from 19 different countries celebrated the festival’s fifth year, which wraps up Friday.

It has the “wow” of Toronto’s authors’ festival — but in a smaller, more intimate setting.

And it sees itself as the bearer of a special mission: to help raise international awareness of Chinese writers. At least 25 were featured in this year’s festival, showcasing some of the country’s top talent, including novelist Bi Feiyu, winner of this year’s Man Asian Literary Prize.

But Pearson, a 42-year-old British-born management trainer, never set out to build what is fast becoming one the world’s great literary venues.

To hear her tell it, it just happened.

She first came briefly to China in 1982 as the daughter of a British diplomat posted to Beijing, but returned to the city in earnest a decade later with a degree in Chinese, and one in Chinese and English literature.

Her idea of a lending library was born of necessity, she explains. It was difficult to get current English-language books in China during the ’90s.

“The only thing you could get at that time was Dickens and Austen from the (government-run) Foreign Languages Bookstore,” she says. “I remember people used to come back to Beijing from visits overseas laden with books and Marmite,” the British food spread.

She focused on books and gathered English volumes wherever she could find them — friends, rummage sales, embassy library castoffs, the UN book sale — and set up a small lending library in a private club to which she and her friends belonged.

It grew from there: first to 2,000 books, then 10,000, then 15,000. Today it stands at 22,000 books.

In the first few years she was forced to move her books, “like a hermit crab,” from one venue to another, scuttling across the Beijing neighbourhood of Sanlitun — one step ahead of the bulldozers transforming the city — until finally, two Chinese friends who had opened a restaurant asked if she’d move in and run it, bringing her library with her.

At the time, Pearson was heading to Mongolia with a friend. She packed her tent, some extra pens and paper and, over the course of a month, scribbled away at the beginnings of a business plan.

She returned to Beijing and took on the project and the Bookworm became a real business — not only lending but selling English books, and hosting a wide array of cultural events.

“I had to knock down a huge amount of walls,” she says. “It was awful — ghastly colours. The bar was by the door; you walked in and immediately got hit. It was just bad feng shui all around,” she says with a laugh.

But she was energized by the prospect of being able to build something basically from scratch.

“I like the energy here,” Pearson says. “And I like the speed. I’m not nostalgic for the old China. I’m not one of those people who wants everything as it was in 1992. I like to see progression, to see an up-and-coming middle class who are taking on more and more civil responsibilities.”

Were she to try such a venture in London, she says, it wouldn’t be possible.

“In a place like the U.K., a lot of this has already been done. You’re just one person existing in this very organized system.

“But here you have to duck and dive and move and work out what’s next.

“I feel very much part of that whole transition. I think this is what holds me.”

That, she says, and the “huge optimism” that is such a part of daily life here.

She opened for business at the current location on Sept. 20, 2005 and held the first Bookworm literary festival the following spring.

Today the Beijing festival has teamed up with festivals in Toronto and three other cities to form a kind of global alliance committed to spreading the word internationally.

In a world fraught with so much political tension, it just might be an effective way to help forge international understanding.

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